TOMMY FLANAGAN
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Flanagan had found a new piano waiting for him at the Showcase, not new off the factory line but new to the club–a seven-foot grand, and not just a grand but a Steinway, a piano that would list out at more than many of us make in a year. In other words, a serious piano. A marvelous piano. For those who have spent the last two decades straining to hear the cloistered notes of the previous instrument–let alone those who strained to wring music from that “sad old lady,” as another fine pianist recently described it–this development answers prayers long ago abandoned. Joe Segal, proprietor of the Jazz Showcase, is not a man of means; the fact that he had spent some of what little he had to upgrade the old instrument just a couple of years ago augured against a purchase of this magnitude. I suspect most of us would echo the comment of drummer Wilbur Campbell, who has performed with countless pianists on the Showcase stage, when he first saw the Steinway: “It’s a miracle!”
No art form depends on its environment and its tools more than music. A room’s acoustics can affect not only the amplitude with which music reaches different portions of the audience but also–by highlighting or dampening different sonic frequencies–which portions of the music reach any of the audience. And of course the instruments themselves affect the process: the differences range from the obvious, such as an out-of-tune violin string, to the subtle, such as the combination of wood, varnish, and craft that allows one violin to project with more power than another.
The 64-year-old Flanagan represents the flowering of bebop in an almost literal sense–the opening up of the original idiom into a jazz style that retains the language and integrity of bebop but places it at the service of a wider range of emotions. Flanagan has two new albums out, one concentrating on the music of Thad Jones, the other dedicated to Ella Fitzgerald (with whom Flanagan played for more than a dozen years), and he played tunes from both at the Showcase, as usual producing one of the loveliest sounds in jazz. In the middle of his run, on May 5, he also played a version of “Giant Steps”–35 years to the day after John Coltrane’s original recording of the tune, which featured Flanagan at the piano.
